The Road to Bone Hill
A Journey into the Modern Renaissance of Mead-Making
In early 2020, amid the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kenton Moore discovered the hobby of homebrewing humanity's oldest fermentable beverage: Mead.
What follows is a passionate exploration into the art of mead-making as Kenton recounts the story of how he came from homebrewing in a small apartment on British Columbia's West Coast, to being on the precipice of starting a commercial Meadery alongside his parents on their farm. It is a brave tale filled with personal triumph, loss, heartbreak, and perseverance, ultimately leading to a lesson worth learning: sometimes passion isn't meant to become a career.
Part memoir, and part instruction manual, The Road to Bone Hill is a worthy addition to your library if you're a fan of homebrewing or just want to read a compelling story with a heartfelt message. This book includes some of Kenton's curated recipes that become more complex as his skill evolves within the story.
“Take this home too,” he had said to me. “See if you can do something with it. Maybe jar it and sell it to your friends for us.” Such famous last words, now that I look back on it.
Have you ever seen five gallons of honey? Felt how heavy it is? Spoiler alert - it is a lot heavier than water! But I took it, with the honourable intention of purchasing jars and labels and doing exactly what Al had suggested. How hard could it be to sell raw unpasteurized honey from the picturesque mountains of British Columbia’s interior? I was up for the challenge, and I bore the bucket of liquid gold home with great enthusiasm. I remember the look on my room-mate Tim’s face when I brought the bucket in. He gave me one of those laughs that only a friend who has known me a long time would give. It was that laugh that said - ‘oh my God man, what have you gotten yourself into this time?’ Little did either of us know that within a month, that bucket of honey would be sitting in my closet; a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up everything I thought I knew about my self and my future.
Sunday, day two of brewing weekend, was just Korbyn and I while Tim was at work. We decided it was time to experiment on something wild, so I hit the book of recipes and notes I had collected looking for an inspiring idea. We found it in a variety of mead known as a Bochet. I had first heard about Bochets in conversations among the mead forums I was frequenting. It was often described as one of the ‘most interesting, terrifying, and incredible meads one could possibly make.’
As the story goes, the recipe and idea of the Bochet was lost to history somewhere in ancient France and only dug up later in 2009 when an obscure French text written by an anonymous author in 1393 was translated into English for the first time. The text, called Le Menagier de Paris (The Good Wife’s Guide), was essentially a misogynists guide to being a responsible wife at the time it was written, but hidden inside this tome was an enticing recipe for something the author called ‘bochet.’
The recipe in the text called for water and honey, brewers’ yeast, and an assortment of spices including ginger and cloves. For the most part, the ingredients listed and even the process as detailed were all well known examples of medieval meads, but it was the preparation steps that really made the recipe stand out. In the instructions, the author called for the honey to be burnt in a cauldron set above flames, until the honey blisters and boils and spits tiny spouts of blackish steam. What the author was describing, we now know, is caramelizing of the honey.
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